We had a fantastic day walking the streets of La Boca, one of the most popular and well known tourist areas of Buenos Aires.  Known as the birthplace of the tango, this one-time shipyard has a famous walkway, the Caminito, where tango dancers perform and artists exhibit their work.

We chilled out, had a meal and a few drinks and soaked up the atmosphere.  Sadly only two or three of these photos are actually ours, our camera battery died within minutes of arriving so we had to borrow a few shots from our rommies in order to write this post.  Yes, bad planning on our part.

We would love to go back of a weekend when supposedly the streets are ram packed with performers, musicians and the like.  It was great while we were there, but you can only imagine the atmosphere…

La Boca is also known throughout the sporting world as the home of Boca Juniors, one of world’s top football clubs.  We could have gone to a game, but neither of us are all that interested in football so we decided against forking out half our monthly budget for two tourists tickets.

An amazingly colourful area. 

Our first touristy site was La Recoleta, a famous cemetery located in the exclusive Recoleta neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.  Graves of some of the most influential and important Argentinian, including several presidents, scientists and wealthy characters reside here.  I expect the grave of María Eva Duarte de Perón, better known as Eva Perón or internationally as Evita, is the most famous.  Most people will remember the movie Evita in which Madonna played Eva Perón. Her Wiki biography is really worth a read, she was quite aninspirational character.

The cemetery contains many elaborate marble mausoleums, decorated with statues, in a wide variety of architectural styles. The entire cemetery is laid out in sections like city blocks with wide tree-lined main walkways branching into sidewalks filled with mausoleums – it is gigantic!

Each grave bears the family name etched into the facade; brass or bronze plaques are added to the front for particular family members. It is one of those cemeteries where the tradition of engraving a death date but no birth date has been maintained.

While many are in fine shape and well-maintained, others have fallen into a state of disrepair.  Several can be found with broken glass which allowed us to take photos of the inside.  Strange to see how they stack the coffins.  The underground chamber seems to go down some distance and could possibly hold up to 30–40 coffins.

Evita’s grave is the one decorated with flowers.

We arrived in the beautiful city of Buenos Aires a week or so ago (yes we are trying to catch up) and spent the majority of our time chilling with our roomies in a great hostel.  There are so many activities and sites to see you could be here for a month and still only cover a small fraction. 

They say that the city can get under your skin – in a good way – and it certainly did for us, well and truly.  Although we did spend the majority of our time in the hostel, we did venture out and about and take the odd snap which we’ve included.  It’s difficult, you want to take photos at every turn, but cannot take your camera out for fear of it being snatched.

These are just some random pics.